Whimsical, Elegant, Encouraging

Here’s the very first page of the graphic novel! Not in its final format, but I thought you might want to see it anyway.

On that off chance that you haven’t figured this out yet, Cordelia Fernwood isn’t my real name. I went back and forth for a long time about whether to even use a fake name, but what it finally came down to is that my real name has four different common spellings, and on top of that the name itself is pretty common, and both of those facts combined make it unsearchable on the internet. This is a good thing when it comes to my personal privacy, but a bad thing when it comes to business.

So I started hunting for a name. I knew I wanted it to be kind of obviously fake, like Lemony Snicket. I don’t want anyone to be deceived; I want to let the audience in on the joke. I also hoped to find some connection to stuff I like— woods, ocean, children’s literature, family, whatever I could find that made it feel like it belonged to me.

The last member of my family who was an old maid, two generations back, was named Pearl. I would have used that, but I couldn’t make “Pearl” work with any of the last names I came up with. Cordelia means daughter of the sea king, among other things, so I feel like it’s at least nod to Great-Aunt Pearl. Besides which, Anne of Green Gables, which I read multiple times growing up, always wanted to be called Cordelia, so here is my chance to make a fictional person’s dream come true by using a fictional name.

Fernwood took a little longer to come up with, but I have ferns in my garden, and one day I was watching the movie version of Enola Holmes, and noticed that her home was named Ferndell Hall, and I thought: yes, but not a dell; a wood. Only after I came up with it did I notice that one of the roads I sometimes drive past is called Fernwood Road, which sounds like just the right kind of romantic to me.

Probably you would like another picture, yes? Here you go:

I think of this as the second page of the prologue of the story; I’m setting up the situation in which the rest of the story takes place.

So then I had a name, but I also wanted a sense of where I was going with this thing. I knew that I wanted to make money by my creative wits, but the question I had was, when people come to my work, what will they be looking for? Because I wanted to be intentional, to be a good boss for myself so to speak. I also wanted to create a consistent (as well as consistently good) experience for customers.

I came up with “whimsical” and “elegant” right away. The third word— I knew I wanted three main words— has been much more difficult to come by, but as of this morning I think I may have it: encouraging.

It helps that a couple of months ago, I realized that the link between my graphic-novel-cookbook and the paper Nativity and paper Easter Set is that I am trying to help others do things for themselves that they might not have originally thought they could do for themselves. You can’t tell it from the pages I’ve posted here, but the Auntie Narwhal story actually does include the full three-ingredient recipe for nut-butter cookies. And, when I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman, I super wanted a nativity for myself, and I got as far as building the little cave for everything to fit in before I abandoned the project because the Christmas season was over. The paper Nativity is an answer to that, and the paper Easter Set is a follow-up to that. I’m as pleased as I could be about a first draft on both of those projects.

It also doesn’t hurt my feelings that one of the ways “encourage” could literally be read is to “give heart.” I would like people, especially children, to feel capable and cheerful about moving forward, but I also would love the world to be little kinder place.

Happy Saturday! Hope everyone has a splendid week. I haven’t gotten much work on Jonah and the Whale done partly because the weather has been glorious for working outside, and I’ve needed to work outside, and Jonah, like Noah, has no associated holiday and therefore sort-of-no deadline. I’ll be back to it once it’s deathly hot outside and (hopefully) the fence I need to paint is all done. If you’re curious about that project, you can check out my other blog: corneliaphilosophenesblog.blogspot.com

And here’s your third picture:

This page is where the story actually starts: Auntie Narwhal is delighted to hear a knock on the door, because she is scheduled to babysit Zachary shark.